


i'm not afraid of anyone (not a soul alive can get behind this wall)

by ifthebookdoesntsell



Series: and then maybe you'll remember me when i'm gone (that's all i could ever want) [1]
Category: Mean Girls - Richmond/Benjamin/Fey
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Gen, It's a meta character study/analysis, This is heavily Regina centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25177402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifthebookdoesntsell/pseuds/ifthebookdoesntsell
Summary: By now, Regina knows that she isn’t the hero in this story called Life, but she keeps that to herself, folding up into a little ball to fall asleep, holding a pillow over her ears so that she can’t hear the fighting.Tell me about Regina learning to be mean because it hurts less than crying, about the old bullies who left the walls of Northshore that tell her that she would soon love all that power, all the praise, all the promise of being first in line, of nobody getting in her way.Tell me about how girls like Regina don’t just one day become mean.Tell me about how broken homes that refuse to truly fall apart and judgement and silent sobs build monsters.(Or, a (meta) study, a fic, an analysis of Regina George, her life and her faults and her absolution. An open letter to anybody who says that she isn't worthy of forgiveness.)
Relationships: Cady Heron/Aaron Samuels, Regina George/Janis Ian, Regina George/Janis Sarkisian, Shane Oman/OFC
Series: and then maybe you'll remember me when i'm gone (that's all i could ever want) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823953
Comments: 16
Kudos: 37





	i'm not afraid of anyone (not a soul alive can get behind this wall)

**Author's Note:**

> hey, i'm back again. this is definitely more meta than i normally go, but i felt the style fit for this piece. i've heard criticisms and insistences that regina isn't worthy of forgiveness, so i thought i would take the time to write this, to set the record straight. 
> 
> i can't tell you if it's an analysis, a fic or a study, but whatever it is, i hope you give it a chance and enjoy. 
> 
> as always, stay safe out there. 
> 
> (fic title from i'm not afraid of anything by jason robert brown.)

Let’s talk about Regina George. 

Let’s talk about how she left cuts and bruises that likely never healed, how she lied, cheated and destroyed to get to the top. Let’s talk about how she slashed and ripped people open with her words. 

Let’s talk about her insecurities, how she stares at herself in the mirror every day for the rest of her life wondering how she can be beautiful enough. Let’s talk about how when she was hit by the bus nobody cried.

Let’s talk about every bully who ever lived. 

Let’s talk about how Regina George is acutely aware of her self-identified unlovability every day of her life. 

Let’s talk about how most every horrible, high school, lunchroom queen is redeemable. 

***

Tell me about the Regina who is thirteen and afraid of what her father would say if she has her lesbian best friend at her birthday party, about how she feels with shaking hands outside Janis’ front door to tell her that they can’t be friends anymore. 

Tell me about the young Regina who cries against her bedroom door when her father would point out something wrong with her, about how she leans on her mother’s shoulder and ask, “why can’t we just leave, Mommy? Why won’t you take me away from here?”

They both know the answer. Most nights, Sabrina George says, “because under all that, he’s a good enough man,” or “because of the money.” On the rare days when he’s away, she says, “only until you’re eighteen,” or “this is what we have to do to survive.” 

Regina would listen to the quiver in her mother’s voice, the shake, and as the years went by, it was no longer there. She remembers the day when she realizes her mom had finally mastered the art of being dishonest. She remembers the day where her mom decides it is better to lie to everyone-- including herself-- if it means that the hurting might stop. 

By now, Regina knows that she isn’t the hero in this story called Life, but she keeps that to herself, folding up into a little ball to fall asleep, holding a pillow over her ears so that she can’t hear the fighting. 

Tell me about Regina learning to be mean because it hurts less than crying, about the old bullies who left the walls of Northshore that tell her that she would soon love all that power, all the praise, all the promise of being first in line, of nobody getting in her way. 

Tell me about how girls like Regina don’t just one day become mean. 

Tell me about how broken homes that refuse to truly fall apart and judgement and silent sobs build monsters. 

***

Let’s talk about how Regina and Shane grow up together: one in his letterman jacket and the other grasping at anything to make herself strong. The varsity patches on Shane’s jacket, that is the search for strength too, looking for anything that looks like belonging. 

Most of high school, and thereafter, they yell at each other-- in the privacy of her bedroom when she feels dirty for doing what she did with him, in his car when she tells him she loves neither him nor Aaron, that she would probably never love a man-- she feels guilty, for once, for breaking someone's heart. 

As the years go by, they hurl insults at each other like bombs, her coming to the defense of both of their sets of flaws, while he angrily weeps through the night about all of the hurt they caused. 

_Do you remember how horrible we were? Do you?_

By morning, they always pretend to have forgotten, curl up on the edge of one of their couches and pass the coffee pot between them until it is empty. They sit and think about their mistakes, all of the terrible words they would take back if they could, and some days, when they aren’t together, Regina holds the metal of the coffee pot just long enough to feel a sting in her fingertips, though she isn’t sure if it’s to remind herself she’s changed or to hold herself accountable for the things she has done. 

***

Let’s talk about how when she’s eighteen, Regina watches the new Star Wars films with Aaron. She doesn’t know how the two of them made up, or even why he chose to give her a _third_ chance, but she sits on the couch nonetheless, tentatively looking to the side, at the way he looks like he finally knows how to be secure in himself, how to be happy. 

She watches as Kylo Ren burns everything to the ground, cuts through rock and wood and space and sky for something he thinks rightfully belongs to him. She watches as he craves warmth and care, and she wonders if she looks like that. 

Aaron gets up to make dinner, and Regina follows, ready to help. He looks at her in surprise, but smiles. They chop vegetables, and she wants to ask if the villain on the screen is who she is too, but the man in front of her, no longer that trusting, naive boy, shakes his head before she can even get the words out. 

There is a difference between men who destroy galaxies and soldiers' minds and a girl who speaks words no harsher than her own father’s.

They know this now. 

They’re older. 

They’re better. 

Still, Regina George is often reduced to the cruelty she displayed her junior year, at sixteen, at twelve, pressed into a book without room for movement. 

It is difficult to remember that people can change. 

***

Let’s talk about Regina after graduation, how she becomes somebody new, how she watches her old classmates go on to fulfill their aspirations, how she doesn’t know what she is going to do with her life. Since the ninth grade, all she has known is how to use her words carefully, how to intimidate, how to get what she wants. She doesn’t really know what it would be good for, but, in the end, she looks into journalism.

Shane’s father has friends in high places, a large donor to most operations in town, so he gets her an interview with the local newspaper right out of college. Shane comes to her new apartment and tells her that he hopes she gets it, taking her out for a drink and welcoming her back to town. He looks different, older, his varsity jacket traded out for a well-pressed button up and slacks. 

On her first day, she looks different too. She trades out her dark makeup for a pen, her heels for flats that still manage to make her look like the tallest person in the room. 

“I remember you!” a dark haired woman says to her. “You were a sophomore when I was a senior. I slated you to take my place when I was gone.” She grins dangerously, obviously just as mean as the day she met Regina in the halls of their old high school. “I’m excited to see what you can do to get those pesky, shy sources to talk.” 

Regina gets tea and coffee for the editors, makes copies and trails after Bridget on interviews and stories. 

“It’s awesome what you can find when you look in places nobody else does,” Bridget practically sings. 

“Going through their giveaway bags in the back of their store isn’t exactly what I think about when searching for something,” Regina contradicts. 

“Still makes for a good story.”

Regina had given Bridget a good story a long time ago, about how she was strong, how she was willing to shed any sort of kindness left inside of her. She had told her lies, and Bridget had taken a garden snake and turned it into a python. 

Regina settles into her job, rising from intern to junior reporter, and the irony isn’t lost on her when she arrives at work one morning to find a dead snake in a box sitting on her chair. Suddenly, she remembers Caitlin crying in the bathroom about the grotesque drawing of a hairy woman’s body some boy had slipped into her locker. 

_Is this how that felt?_

Regina takes the box outside, tossing it into the garbage, before going into the tiny kitchen to wash her hands and grab another cup of coffee. She runs her hand under the cold water. Cady Heron (Business and Economics section, junior reporter) comes in to grab a cookie from the stash in the cabinet about the counter. She stares at Regina for a moment. 

“Did you get something in the mail this morning?” she asks, shoving half of her cookie into her mouth. 

“Yes.” Regina laughs humorlessly. “It’s safe to assume it wasn’t you, right?” 

Cady nods. 

“We’re good, Regina,” Cady says, swallowing. “Besides, if it were me, I would have put my name at the bottom. You told me to own my shit.” 

Regina snorts quietly, cracking a smile. She’s still washing her hands, the water practically frozen coming out of the tap. For the first time, she knows how all of those girls in her book felt. For all of her apologies, it was impossible to _really_ get it. She feels sick. 

Students had cursed each other for supposed insults they made about each other (Regina’s insults, in a book that she never meant to show anybody), and now, those in her town were calling her out for the things she wrote in something that she fully intended for everybody to read. 

Cady points to her. 

“Turn off the water; you’ll run up the bill,” she says. “Your hands are clean.” 

***

High school lunchroom bullies are spoiled and simple. That is, most of them. They do not attack the strong; they attack the scared, the weak, the lonely. They attack those that are easy. Those who are outcast. 

So let’s write in Regina’s story, that which is missing, that which we believe, that which is implied. There is a history of frightened little children finding their way out of the abyss, out of the darkness. So let us write Regina a story as angry, as solitary, as melancholy as those we have found it in our hearts to forgive. 

This is not to give her excuses. This is not to find commiseration. This is not to completely absolve her. This is to find a way to understand her. This is a story about learning to be better. This is a story about progress. This is a story about kindness. And to give her all of those things, she _must_ have her own story. 

It is funny how the protagonists of narratives will take the same actions as our antagonists, but we do not indict them the same.

Cady Heron saved the juniors from themselves, but she left a lot more behind her than just a broken plastic crown and a lovestruck Aaron. Cady was not the bully in our story. She was the Good because she realized her mistakes, because our original storytellers told us to be sympathetic, however much we knew there was no hero at Northshore High School. Let us not forget that Gretchen likely sobbed herself to sleep, guilty of telling Regina’s secrets, sixteen and searching for validation. Let us not forget the way Karen was so trusting, the way she told Cady she would still be her friend. 

And what about Regina? Let us remind ourselves that her life is worthwhile as well. Let us remind ourselves, just as she reminds us in the second act, that she is human. 

***

Let’s talk about how, despite all of her resentment, whenever Shane or Gretchen or Karen is hurt by somebody, feels lonely, feels unworthy, Regina learns how to arrive at their side in a flash and help. Let us believe that Regina becomes as blindly loyal to her friends as Janis and Damian are to each other. 

The years race by, and she watches as Shane falls in love. Her name is Kate, and she’s pretty. Her eyes are innocent. 

“This isn’t the world forgiving you,” Regina hisses at him one night over one too many glasses of wine. Maybe she’s jealous of him, or maybe she just feels mean again. “I don’t care how sweetly she looks at you. We are not good people.” 

“I know that, but she believes I’m good. Is it so wrong to feel like that’s enough?” 

They fight about Kate for weeks on end, but then Regina sees the way he looks at her. The way she shoves ice cream into his mouth, and she hears him laugh with an uninhibited kind of joy that she hasn’t heard since they were kids. Regina isn’t worried about them anymore. 

Kate wouldn’t allow the world to reduce her to a reward for a man who learned to be better. 

When Shane Oman Jr. is born, he comes out screaming, his eyes squeezed shut. Regina is outside, sitting next to a barely revived Shane. She takes selfies with his passed out body so she can show Kate later before splashing some water on his face so he doesn’t miss the birth of his son.

She is the eighth person SJ ever sees, after his mother and father, two sets of grandparents and Kate’s younger brother. She takes the little boy in her arms, gently cradling him, smiling at him. 

_I know you will be kind. I know it in my heart,_ she tells him silently. _You’ll be just as strong as your father, but you will know that strength comes from sweetness. Your mother will teach you that._

_Please do not turn out like me._

***

Regina walks down Main Street, and she catches everyone from her class that never made it out of their scrappy, sometimes shitty, town judging her. She walks down the street and wonders if this is how they felt walking the halls of their high school. 

She confides in Cady about it, over coffee and pastries one day in the cubicle they now share at work. Cady chuckles quietly.

_That is how we felt._

Regina heads down that street again the next day and feels like an even worse person than she did yesterday, feels like the villain in everyone’s story. She feels like they’re allowed to look at her, to judge her.

She spends the whole year avoiding pink, walking along the street that comes before Main to go buy her lunch, feeling small for the first time, until Kate asks her about it, until Cady buys her a little fuchsia beanie for the newspaper’s holiday party. 

At twenty-eight, Regina has a story she needs to cover, and there’s really no time to take the side streets to get there. So, she straightens her spine, ignoring the twinge, settles into a confident stride and takes a deep breath. People stare, but she keeps on walking. 

“It’s hard not to shrink under their gaze,” Cady muses once when they’re the last ones in the office, senior reporters by now. They aren’t _really_ friends, at least not quite, but this is definitely a turning point. Many have tried to help Regina as the years have gone by: her father’s old “friends,” her therapist, people who thought the little blonde girl from a town outside of Chicago was weak, but Cady’s is the first to get through to her. Maybe it’s because it feels more like a tale, more like something the woman experienced herself. 

In actuality, she knows for a fact that Cady experienced it herself. 

“Mean people can seem like they’re protecting you,” Cady says, laughing quietly and gesturing to Regina gently. “They make you feel new and needed, and you think that it’s the only thing in the world that makes you special. You let them change you-” Regina looks at her guiltily, but Cady shakes her head, reminding her that she forgives her- “but every single one of us is still responsible for what we do. Just remember that we were only kids, Regina. We didn’t understand the world back then.” 

***

Regina starts to meet up at the bar for a meal and drink with Damian on Fridays, which isn’t something she ever planned. They had gone to school together since kindergarten, but by fifth grade it was obvious they were on different paths. Cady comes along on days where she isn't working late, and Janis shows up too. 

“Why do you keep coming back here?” Damian asks her the first time they run into each other and decide to sit together, both nursing a beer and ham and provolone sandwiches. He gestures discreetly to the way the bartender was glaring at her. People ask her this question often, when they saw her at the first gala she covered, when she came back for their high school reunions. They always have their eyes on her, looking for the bite that became synonymous with her name. Most days she looks away, on others, she bares her teeth and lets them flee in fear. 

“Because we aren’t sixteen anymore,” Regina says, taking a bite of her food. “Every single one of us was mean, Damian. Even you.” He nods, acknowledging the truth in the statement. “But see, you boys get called strong for hurting those who hurt you, and if us girls try to do the same, then we’re just sluts, whores, bitches. You’re a man, now,” she laughs icily. “That means you get to take your pick of which word you want to use on me.” 

***

For her birthday, Cady gets Regina a stack of old films. She tries to refuse them, but the woman shoves them into her hands. Everything Cady has ever done has been for a reason, so she accepts them, watches them, and wonders if this is how Damian and Janis felt every Halloween after the eighth grade. 

Shane doesn’t understand it, but Regina will watch them while she’s on the treadmill, letting the sweat move down the curve of her back, around the crooked vertebrae of her spine. She’s hot by the end of it, red faced and in need of water, but it makes her feel alive. 

Warmth has always been life to her: the way her mother would dry her hot tears, cuddle her against her neck so that Regina could breathe in the scent of fresh baked sweets and old perfume, the way she, Gretchen and Karen would huddle under the heat lamp in the brunette’s backyard after running away from a party that the cops found out about and laugh their asses off, feeling young and whole, the way she woke up covered in blankets after the bus crash almost did her in. 

In one of the movies, there is a young boy, and the gods ask him if he would like to become one of them. She watches as he holds his breath, contemplating the thought, before he catches sight of the girl he loves. He declines. 

Regina shuts off the movie and cranks up the speed of the belt. 

_Would she have had the strength to decline?_

She ponders the question for many days, and one, quiet night, another of having nobody in her bed beside her, she stops. She is certain of the answer. It makes her cold, so she just tries to remind herself that she is still, in fact, alive despite the way she feels frozen. 

She listens to her stuttering heartbeat.

***

Regina thinks about how falling in love offered Shane a second chance. He was saved by the sweetness of a girl from the bookstore on Second Street, by the fact that he needed a gift for his mother on her birthday. 

Shane made the decision to love Kate, and now he feels like he belongs. He doesn’t need his patches, his fancy shirts, his Italian shoes. Shane loves Kate, and now, he’s strong. 

Let us allow Regina to fall in love as well. 

Maybe she falls as quickly as an anchor in an ocean, or maybe it’s a true slow burn: maybe there’s a new girl in town, a waitress at her and Damian’s spot. They trade names and stories, and Regina waits years to buy her a drink, waiting to see if she would start to judge her like all the rest in town. One day, maybe, the girl might take Regina to California to meet her family. She meets her mother and father, who are happily in love, her siblings, and, for once, Regina swallows her jealousy, her resentment, the echoes of her father screaming about God and duty, and instead, she breathes out, “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” 

We could give her a true love, somebody who knows nothing of her past. We could offer her a second chance. We could finally give her a reason to tell the gods that she would rather be human. 

Or, it’s possible that there isn’t a waitress. Or maybe that love isn’t the true one. Instead, it’s possible that it mellows Regina out, shows her what could be, until they’ve grown too much for each other, in different directions, come to crave different things. Maybe they watch one last old film together, and they cry into each other’s shoulders before saying goodbye the way lovers do. Regina never watches that movie ever again. 

It’s possible that Shane learns to love, so let’s make it possible for Regina, too.

Maybe it’s a law clerk with dreams of being a partner. She turns legal research into exposés, drafted orders and opinions into words that win cases. They send her to give a statement to the paper about the survivor in a car crash that could have been avoided, about the fact that the man is suing the automobile company, and she lets a few more things slip to Regina than she was originally instructed, giving her a wink. 

“Only for you, George.”

Maybe the front page article that Regina writes helps them win the case. 

Maybe her drive urges Regina to be better. Maybe they remind each other that there are other things that are important besides work. Maybe that’s all they learn from each other before it’s cut short. 

Maybe she kisses Janis in the closet of the woman’s first showing at her new gallery. Maybe she presses her into the wall, running her fingers gently over soft inner wrists, feeling guilty about the faded lines she finds. Maybe she congratulates her, presses her tongue into her mouth and finds that she’s breathing easy for the first time in her whole life. Regina brings Janis back to her apartment, lays herself bare, and it feels like coming home. 

This feels most plausible. 

Then again, maybe she does not fall in love with any of them. Or maybe she falls in love with all of them, and Janis is her Forever. Maybe they all fill the empty side of her bed at one point, teach her things about saying how you feel, about holding breakable perfection in your hands, about every way to let go. And every way to hold on. 

We could give her a true love and call it second chance. Call it rebirth. Call it light in the dark. Call it redemption. We could surmise that it gets her through the lonely hours of darkness, to feel the shift beside her, to feel arms around her. They make her realize how deeply she has craved touch, how deeply she has craved being truly human: flawed and broken and bruised. 

We could surmise that this is what changes Regina. We would be dead wrong. 

It isn’t that somebody is next to her, that she feels someone steal the covers from her for the first time in her life. This is necessary, of course, but it is not the change. 

They tug her closer. She lets them. 

The thing about love, though, about _loving_ and _being_ loved, is that it isn’t enough to change somebody. It isn’t enough to be a second chance, a rebirth, a light in the dark, or redemption. At the end of the day, somebody holding you, kissing your cheek, doesn’t make the world forgive you. It doesn’t make up for the broken boys and girls who went home to their mama’s and cried into their pillows. Somebody telling you their secrets doesn’t save you. Somebody seeing into the depths of your heart, past the cruelty and right to your insecurities, doesn’t save you. 

Someone else’s trust does not save you. Not when you do not think you are worth saving. 

So let us give her something that makes her believe she is. Let us give her something that she feels is enough to redeem her. A love and a trust that is stronger than any other that she could have felt. A trust worth being human for, a love worth risking everything for. 

Let’s say that Regina George learns how to love and trust herself. 

Let’s write a life for her where it is not the love of somebody else that comes to save her, one where she does not take the sweetness from a lover’s lips and pawn it off as her own until she’s able to produce it herself, one where she doesn't take every word of sympathy from those she has hurt, one where she is an aunt and a godparent and a good daughter, where she buys ice cream cones and toys, is held tight by her best friend and teaches SJ to read. 

Let’s write Regina a life where she decides to save herself, decides that she’s worthy of it. 

Let’s write Regina a life where she manages to turn back into that little garden snake: still ready to bite, but also willing to curl around your finger, to retreat when necessary, to be held. 

***

Bridget finds misconduct in stolen looks, broken relationships in the brush of a hand between a boss and his secretary. Regina watches as she pulls semi-facts from a young girl who doesn’t know any better, and she sees herself in the way she looks bitter and broken. Regina furiously scribbles her observations on Bridget’s technique into her reporter’s notebook.

They stake out, go to galas and business openings, the raven-haired correspondent and her apprentice. Bridget takes dishonesties and makes them sound like truth. 

Regina takes more notes. 

“You can’t be serious,” Cady says one day, tossing a skittle into her mouth. “You really want to do what she does?”

“Don’t you think that I would be successful?” Regina replies, just as easily, grabbing one of the candy’s from the bowl. It feels like a test, like seeing how long they can pretend like they’re still juniors, like they don’t give a shit about each other. 

“You’d be good at it,” Cady says, throwing back several more of the sugary circles. “Just don’t lose what you’ve found." 

Regina and Bridget continue to stalk the streets happily, trapping Northshore citizens in their seats at restaurants and squeezing truths from their throats. Regina stops listening when Bridget begins to ask for lies, for _alternative facts,_ for hatred that she can turn into scandal. 

She was a kid, once, in a home that didn’t feel like one, with a father who did more yelling than he did sleeping. She, too, was once taught that love was a liability, that friends were assets. It makes her sick to see somebody banking on that. 

While Bridget looks for the next big story, the next big lie, Regina makes a decision. She does not want to do what Bridget does. 

Instead, she begins to look for corrupt councilmen, dishonest CEOs. She stays in the shadows, using everything that Bridget taught her while keeping the integrity she fought so hard to reobtain. She takes pictures with her phone of shady deals, learns how to wear sneakers so she can run away from security guards, practices the way she can bat her eyelashes and make a man fall to his knees. 

Her pen is as dangerous as a sword. She hopes that those exposed in their wrongdoings learn how it feels to dress a wound, to cry out for help in stopping their bleeding. 

Regina becomes the apex predator once more. She tears into her enemies, into the double-dealing members of her town, and when she bares her teeth she no longer lets them flee. She sips her coffee in her shared cubicle and watches as her friend rips the complaints and hatemail they’ve received to shreds. 

She brings down a two-faced bankhead, leaves the superintendent-- who tries to cut arts funds without telling anybody about it-- out to dry. She airs everyone’s dirty laundry out for the whole town to see, and every single word of every single article she writes is nothing but the truth. 

In this way, Regina does not give up her hardness. Does not give up the anger in her heart. She couldn’t be pliable, easily broken, even if she tried, so she does this instead. She’s around every corner, in every meeting. She waits, and she waits, and she waits, and the stories fall in her lap because people are careless and cruel.

This is the world. 

This is the truth; she must tell it. 

She’ll never get a chance at Heaven if she lets these foul scoundrels live without owning their sins. 

They should be frightened of her. They should get out of her way. They should hear her footsteps down every hall, see her smile in the ink on the page in every article that hits the presses. 

The real story they should see is how only a girl who was once cruel can recognize those worse than her. The real story they should see is Regina George (senior reporter, Features section) has sharp claws, and if you come too close you just might bleed. 

Regina cuts a piece of her guilt out every time she writes an article, and she enjoys seeing the way it’s splattered onto the page in the form of words. 

This is her life now. Her heart is on those pages. She’s screaming. Northshore’s elite better listen up, or they’ll be next. 

This does not make her hands clean. But it helps her feel less dirty, less horrible. 

She and Cady proofread each other’s articles, fix typos, and while Cady teases her for her third black coffee of the night, she feels a warmth wash over her. It feels like friendship. It feels like being saved. 

On some nights, when Cady has left early to meet up with Aaron (to which Regina makes kissy faces until her friend swats her and flips her off), she’ll be unable to stop herself from reading the angry letters. 

_Slut. Whore. Bitch._

Mostly, they make her laugh, but on rare, lonely evenings after the sun sets, the words taste sour on her tongue, and she feels a warm wetness behind her eyes. She tilts her head up to the sky to look for a sign, and when she doesn’t find one, she drives to the Oman’s, plays with SJ until he’s asleep in her lap and offers to order Kate and Shane dinner. 

They offer for her to sleep on the couch, just so she doesn’t have to be in an empty apartment. 

She accepts. 

***

Redemption. It starts with an apology, with an admission of wrongdoing, with a realization. 

Regina catches snow in her hands and throws it back into the sky on her good days, feeling like she’s worth saving. On her bad ones, she holds it in her palms without gloves, denying herself warmth, life, allowing the coolness to burn her skin. She wants to yell, to say she’s sorry, to hold herself accountable, but now, the only way she knows how to do that is by writing an article. 

How strange it would be if she wrote one about herself. 

On these days, Regina doubles down, splattering more of her guilty heart onto thin pages, taking ice cold showers, feeling odd, angry at herself for wishing to feel warm. 

The point of her story is to be horrible, to be awful, to be a cautionary tale, right? She was written to be mean, but her life does not stop when the curtain on her high school life closes. 

***

Regina is awarded a key to the city, and everyone who ever despised her shows up to thank her for exposing their boss, their spouse, their parent, their coworker. She accepts their appreciation, but she does not accept any of their offers to have dinner. Instead, like always, she goes home with Aaron and Cady, eats a meal with them and prays for herself. She feels warm, and she does not feel guilty. 

It reminds her of senior year, of playing lacrosse, of Gretchen and Karen driving her to get cheese fries off campus. It reminds her of her mother after the divorce, the lightness of her being. It reminds her of seeing SJ help a turtle that was crossing the street, the relief that he is kind and good, just as she had hoped. 

And now, years after, her stuttering heartbeat has evened out, and she has learned how to love herself, how to hold herself in the night, managed to steal the covers from herself. She gets to experience the joy of Shane pushing SJ into the theater when he sees how his son looks longingly at the stage, has Cady to text under the table when their editors drone on and on, gets to watch the way the redhead bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing. Damian meets her for sandwiches every week, and they exchange gossip. 

It _is_ quite plausible that she finds her Forever in Janis. But still, it only happens after she learns how to save herself. 

Above all else, Regina feels fulfilled-- the paper gives her a way to work through her guilt, a way to feel like she’s contributing, making her town better. She gets driven off by bodyguards of powerful people that don’t want her poking around, kicked out of galas that she doesn’t have a ticket to. She starts receiving letters of gratitude, little hints at other backroom schemes hidden in the pages of writing, and she follows the leads to their center. 

When dead snakes find their way to her cubicle or her front porch, she heads into the back and buries them; everybody deserves a chance at ascension. 

When somebody calls her a bitch, a whore, a slut, she simply thanks them and clicks open her pen to write down their name. She has found that only the liars call her those things. 

For the moment, she allows them to flee, grins at them dangerously and heads back to the office to look them up.

There is still so much truth to be told, so much work to be done. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! what did you think? the plan is to make this a series; is it a good plan? let me know in the comments below. it always makes my day when i get the little notification for a comment or a kudo :)
> 
> as always, i'm @ifthebookdoesntsell on tumblr. come yell at me!


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